Hardworking, forthright Joseph Bartlett Eastman, Office of Defense Transportation boss, was entitled to spout an unadorned “Damn!” if he wanted to. He probably did. For last week he had an unexpected problem on his able hands: truck and bus-line operators were objecting to the nationwide patriotic 35-mile-an-hour rubber-saving speed limit.
No lack of patriotism made the American Trucking Assn. and the National Assn. of Motor Bus Operators ask Joseph Eastman for help. They had all sorts of reasons:
The nation’s important* trucks and busses cannot economically stick to 35 miles an hour for mechanical reasons. Of the 18,000-odd U.S. busses, some 12,000 are designed to cruise at 45 to 50; so are a good many of the four and a half million U.S. trucks. By & large they go into fourth (direct) gear at about 40; to run at 35 they have to remain in third gear, burning up more gas per mile and wearing out their gears.
Even if new differentials were installed to permit 35-mile-an-hour driving, schedules would be knocked awry, division points on long hauls would have to be moved closer together (an appalling task). Many drivers who live at division points would quit for war jobs rather than move.
Lower speeds mean reduction in ton-miles and passenger-miles traveled—a reduction curable only by acquisition of new trucks and busses. And where can operators buy trucks and busses these days, they wonder.
Cause of this dilemma lay inadvertently in the lap of the erudite Baruch Committee, which had recommended the 35-mile speed limit after rigorous passenger-car tests, but had thought less of the special problems of busses and trucks.
Joseph Eastman never solves any problem hastily, would rather be sure than swift. At week’s end (as the truckers’ association drew up a resolution at its St. Louis convention to seek modification of the speed limit and draft deferment of key men) he was being cautious, careful with this one. As a solution he could go to Rubber Czar William Jeffers, get Jeffers to: 1) exempt trucks and busses from the 35-mile limit, let them go 40; 2) let things stand as they are, wink at 40-mile driving by trucks and busses; or 3) lift the 35-mile limit to 40 for all vehicles. Most likely choice: the last.
* Thousands of U.S. communities are wholly dependent on bus and truck transportation. Nearly 60% of all livestock is hauled to market by truck; 25 million tons of coal are shipped by truck each year; a survey of 741 Michigan war factories showed that trucks carried 65% of all incoming materials, 69% of all outgoing. Of all live poultry received in New York City, 76% arrives by truck.
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